‘Can’t change the ten,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You read?’ He pointed to the yellow sign — the one about the driver’s helplessness in the face of any bill larger than five. ‘Can’t do it.’
‘That sign must be ten years old. You never heard of inflation?’
‘Can’t do it.’
‘Ah, keep the change. You guys have got to face up to things. You’re just not being realistic.’
The cab moved wearily away. I looked up, across the street, and saw a series of sloped garage gangways, minded by the hulks of trucks. On the fendered pot belly of one of these dead or fossilized machines sprawled the tanned torsoes of three young men. Two were stripped to the waist, slabby, downy, while the third was just a leaning patchwork of studded leather and jean rag. The entrance to Fielding’s loft, I now noticed, lay directly beyond them, through them, a numbered door between the big black slats … With a flourish I fastened the middle button of my new suit (off-white with charcoal seaming: I’m not sure about It—I wish you were here, I wish you were here to tell me it looked okay), eased my hands into my trouser pockets, and ambled loosely across the street.
Now I’ve never been given any bother by the gays. To an almost hurtful degree, I don’t seem to be their type. It just doesn’t come up. It just isn’t a problem. But as I walked across the jarred and cratered road and sensed the usual quickenings of irony and aggression I also sensed something further — I sensed that my weight, my mass, my meat was being appraised, registered, scaled, not with lust, no, but with a carnal speculation I had never felt before. Christ, is this how you chicks feel? I stared dead ahead at the doorway, with the stirring men present but unpinpointed in my sight.
I walked past them.
‘Reader,’ someone seemed to say.
I paused. I hung my head. You can walk away but I cannot walk away. I turned, and asked with real interest, ‘What did I hear you call me?’
‘Breeder,’ said the man. He held a kind of grappling hook between his legs. ‘Big breeder.’
My head was full of good things to say — but I just snorted, and erased him with the flat of my hand, and walked on. Even this wasn’t smart. Even this was jungle-dumb … I came through the door. Half-blinded by shadow I made out a steep wall of steps and moved towards it. Then behind me I heard the sounds of footsteps and stiff hinges and the death-rattle of shivering chains. I tell you, I went up those steps faster than a scalded faggot, propelled by a barbarous diuretic terror on behalf of my exposed rear end… The heavy door at the top didn’t give until the fifth push, but by then I had turned, and seen the shrugging figures as they retreated into the light, and now I could hear only laughter.
I chested my way through and stood panting and blinking in a glass-walled theatre of spacious light, the air so dustless and oceanic that it showed you only the dirt in your human eyes. I steadied. Among the pine supports in the far corner stood Fielding Goodney, looking ridiculously suave and decisive — and somehow air-conditioned — in his jeans and fresh white shirt, in his suit of youth, and his money colour. He was issuing instructions to three workmen or caterers in tublike blue overalls. He acknowledged me with a flat palm upraised.
Waiting for my breath to find its heavy keel I took a turn around the hired loft, I lit a cigarette, whose first jab doubled me up with an unmufflable bark of outrage from my lungs. A tearful itch tickled my lids as spoked hangovers flashed past. Whew, this drinking deal, this drinking life-choice, it’s very hard on those who choose it. I wandered on, striving to enjoy the light, passing hospitalic drapes and hoods, loose sections of electromagnetic silverboard, a workbench, a winded pinball table. Hung on the back wall were half-a-dozen milky seascapes. Whoever painted them saw life as clean as toothpaste, or pretended to. I turned, taking the sun full in the face. Up here with the high windows, Manhattan was hidden and you saw only twin shafts of the World Trade Center, two gold lighters against the strong and pressing blue of the outer air. I shook my head. The mote in my eye, that dead spot where no light lives, wiggled its black finger at me.